Google SEO News and Discussion Forum

I am the owner of a large < specialized topic > news website. We have seen continuous good traffic from Google ever since we started, 5 years ago. However, on the 27th June 07 our Google referrals dropped suddenly to around 1/7 of what they had previously been. It has remained the same for each day since. We are still number one for < our main keyword phrase >, but all our article rankings seem to have vanished.

We have staff, who we pay each month with revenue earned from Adsense. Obviously, with the drop in traffic our Adsense revenue has gone through the floor. So now we are faced with the possibility of not being able to meet our costs in the coming months.

I guess it is possible, if this happened at the same time last year to other people, that Google may just be using the holiday season to make some alterations to their servers (taking them offline?) or something like that. It really makes no sense, so that is all that I can come up with.

It seems as if this has happened to a lot of other people. So, my question is, for those of you who have seen this before - do the rankings come back? If so, how long does it normally take?

Thanks

A Worried Webmaster.

[edited by: tedster at 4:36 pm (utc) on July 1, 2007][edit reason] make specifics more general [/edit]

I noticed an interesting change across several verticals Sunday(7/8) that lasted for 3 days and have gone back to previous rankings as of this morning(7/11).

To summarize the changes I saw:

-less authoritative sites seemed to be competing for the top rankings with the normal 900 lb gorilla sites -Sites that have fallen to oblivion in the past year reappeared in top spots -New sites(~1 yr old and newer) seemed to gain serious steam -Sites with old-fashioned reciprocal link type inbounds seemed to get a bump

I don’t know what these changes mean is going on – but I noticed this across multiple markets – and the first page results changes to new results and back to the old were in sync.

Anyone else notice these changes? Have any other factors they noticed during the shift?

There are definately some changes being made. I noticed that too with my website. It used to be on the top of the major keyword and this month it dropped down and has been fluctuating somewhere between 7 and 10. Traffic has of course dropped. On July 8th it went up to 7th and today its back to the 10th position.

About two hours ago i had checked the ranking of the site for a particular keyword and it was on the 7th position on the 1st page.

After about 2 hours when i checked the ranking it had completely dissapeared.

There was a google bot visit after i had checked. ( i checked the logs)

What i find is that my all inside pages have got indexed but my home page has is not indexed at all. The home page was well indexed for last many months. and we have been having good ranking for few imp keywords.

What do i do. How long does it normally take to get things back to normal.

It appears that my site's traffic may be returning - it got nobbled on 9th July - but is picking up again now. At least I only had to wait 3 days this time. I think the guys in the plex are twiddling again - well, it is summer!

I'm in a similar situation except that my homepage and category keywords have really remained stabled but our product page that did really well have seem to be the big cause of our traffic to fall. The site is over 165K pages. Out of which 70% are product pages.

Being a big site we also have many product pages in supplemental. In June we saw a big jump in traffic for two weeks and noticed many pages that didn't rank previously started to rank some were in supplemental while other were not.

SEOold, I think the big drop in visitors for large sites occures every time when Google needs their horse power for other calculations than crawling. They simply remove priority from crawling at that time.

Every thime this happens large sites suffer, because more and more pages become supplemental, but at the same time other pages can't get out of the supplemental index due to poor crawling.

SEOold, I think the big drop in visitors for large sites occures every time when Google needs their horse power for other calculations than crawling. They simply remove priority from crawling at that time.

Every thime this happens large sites suffer, because more and more pages become supplemental, but at the same time other pages can't get out of the supplemental index due to poor crawling.

I have observed this with my large sites continuously when their our big SERP changes. They usually start with a large traffic boost and then dip down but eventually comes back around. So i can see what you mean. Is this something you have noticed with your own large sites or client sites?

Are u also able to see with any analytics that bots are crawling pages less then the usual or is this an observation that you have noticed with large sites in general?

I have noticed all this with my own sites (large sites with more than 100k URLs each of them). I'm checking my server access_log for each of my domains at least 10 times a day, so I can see the different patterns in crawling.

You can also see this effect using the "site:" command. I know it's unreliable, but if you see less of your URLs in the index using "site:" it meens that Google dropped supplemental URLs from their index. This happens quite often for large site as explained if Google needs their horse power for different calculations. But of course it can also happen if some of your incoming high quality links are devalued.

Hopefully they'll bounce back. Was almost invisible and supplimental in many cases for close to a year, bounced back without making any changes except adding some more content and it looks like early this am something happened and most everything fell off the map again.

It's realyl strange though, as there are a few select keywords that do maintian their rankings for no apparent reason.

Yay guys, I want to report that I didn't do much changes other than started to add content to my site again (WordPress based blog) and guess what? My site re-appeared in the #1 spot in the SERP. It was gone from I would say Monday until last night. I checked yesterday and nothing showed up. For some odd reason I decided to just check this morning and it showed up! My traffic has been restored. This is the second time that something like this has happened. I'm just happy it was fixed and not permanent!

My Google traffic went on June 28th then came back to normal on July 11th now on July 14th it went again. Have many of you experienced these wild fluctuations? These fluctuations happen to our google traffic last year all through June till Aug..

I'm seeing some of the largest changes this morning that I've seen in many months, over a wide variety of terms and types of terms. It could be just a burst of some different data centers... I'm not a close data center watcher... but it's noticeable over more than one entryway into Google.

I'm seeing major jumps or shifts up in... - pages that have been 950ed - one-word searches (with the Google Directory moving up) - long-tail searches where I'd attributed prior good rankings to inbound links for modifiers rather than strong onpage optimization for those modifiers. Some of these had shifted down (some but not all were 950ed) and are now way up. - pages in a site that had not previously ranked for the given searches.

It's way too early to say whether these will stick. It does appear, though, that Google is trying to fix some of the collateral damage we've been seeing for a while.

I have not seen a topic about the 'new' Google update i am seeing in The Netherlands. Several websites have been dropped from the SERPS giving a site:domain.nl zero results. The websites itzelf have Pagerank 3 or above. Also i am seeing some strange things happening in the new presented serps. There are more articles listed and 'new' websites, news articles, almost no subdomains, startpages. Some of the original 'big and 3-4+ years old' websites have been dropped with a -5 or more overal. Anyone seeing the same thing in other country's? Anyone knowing what is happening?

[edited by: tedster at 10:04 pm (utc) on July 16, 2007][edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

For some reason the changes this week end looked to me like a rollback to approx. 10 days ago.

I am not judging however I saw some obvious spam and extremely low end websites way up while some parked domains strangely found their way on pages 2-3.

I haven't heard of any NL updates nor seen any changes in major eupropean countries - but it would be a very good thing that GG starts filtering the obvious spam going on over there and keeps spreading as if it was a best practice (after all... it works).

Anyways, it looks like big GG is testing, hopefully they will, one day, keep up with their promises: filtering obvious link buyers and understanding relevant/good content. Well not so sure if they promised but they make it like if they did and for now I don't see where the improvements are overall.

Filtering spam sites is a good thing i think. But i see websites who have for example a large index with a listing of several articles and the artikles listing is explained or extented on next pages. Or some pages (like forums) who have a listing of 10 post per page or 20 post per page (this depends on /10/ or /20/ behind the url). These things are on big PR3-4 sites and old websites more often. I have seen serverl websites dropped from Google on the site:domain.com query. It can be so that Google is dropping those becuase of dubplicate content. The one with 10 or 20 forum posts per page i can imagine, but not the index with 100 links and if someone kliks on a certain link they get a small explaination about the links or artikles listed.

There are many, many domains dropped from index in The Netherlands searching on the site:domain.com query. Startpages, sites with more whan one index where articles are beeing explained on pages. On top of that big 3 year old sites have dropped -5 or more. The articles of blogs and low quality sites are up.

This morning i checked again. This is still not over, some big sites dropped indexes from websites itself are not linked anymore in the SERPS. I only see articles and homepages. But the big known site to be expected are gone. Users must be very upset to only get "dated news" articles and homepages. They alzo want good relevant info from website indexes (they have for example a index about all the carrs that have the same specification, only homepage and one car is listed. And not big known sites. The news articles are dated.

As far as i can tell google is punishing websites that have indexes themself. And this should be a bad thing. Google must also list those lists in the SERPS. Users may want to find a list of certain things. Also i think google is punishing websites that have for example forum type structures, that way cartain posts will show up on the 20 post per page and 10 posts per page. (via the links users may want to click in dropdown box or elseway.

And most concerning i am that big sites that would be expected on page one are gone... or websites that are removed completly from index (site:domain.com command gived zero results).

Our main keyword is pluralized (ie. blue widgets), and our on-page optimization as well as link building efforts have centered around the plural form. Due to that, we have always ranked well for the singular version of the keyword, riding the coattails of our optimization. On 6/29 we went from #8 to #136. The ranking page changed from the homepage to a seemingly random internal page.

The weird thing is that this same scenario happened to two competitors that I have been tracking, so it doesn't seem isolated to our site.

Anyone else notice this shift? Obviously, we haven't optimized for the singular, and I wouldn't have brought it up if I hadn't checked that the same thing happened to our competitors. Did we get too complacent with the similarity of rankings between plural and singular keywords?

[edited by: tedster at 9:17 pm (utc) on July 18, 2007][edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]